Fort Worth, Texas magazine sent more than 4,500 local physicians a survey, asking them to voluntarily rate their peers and name the best doctors in Tarrant County. Medical professionals willing to participate went online to cast their votes.

While Fort Worth, Texas magazine provided the fields of specialty, the physicians identified the professionals they regard as being leaders in those fields.

The final results were submitted to a select panel of physicians for review.

Fort Worth will be formally designated an International Safe Community by the World Health Organization during the City Council meeting at 7 p.m. Feb. 12. With this designation, Fort Worth will become the 300th international Safe Community, the 23rd in the United States and the second in Texas.

Since 1904, the Society has been helping Sailors, Marines, and their families deal with the unexpected.

By assisting with interest-free loans and grants for food, temporary shelter and other basic living expenses, military families can deal more effectively with unforeseen hardship.

Veterans Day is the perfect time to honor those who serve by ensuring active and retired Marines and Sailors have the financial resources they need in times of crisis. Your support will make a very real difference.

Make your Veterans Day gift to the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society today:

It was well overdue, but as usual only a crisis can make things happen.

Something changed on the blog, I know not what, but suddenly I couldn’t get into the dash through a web browser (but could through the WordPress app, odd). After several emails with the webmaster, a trial of reinstalling the software, etc, it was determined that the theme, very custom and lovingly assembled by my great web guy, was the problem. Time for an updated theme.

Thus, this. It’ll get tweaked going forward, but for now this is the starting point. (It looks good on my iPhone, too).

It’s also a chance to clean out some dead/dying stuff from the sidebars. Remember blogrolling? Blog link lists? I noticed the number of dead blogs on Instapundit last night, and realized my blog was certainly no better on that front, so those are gone (for now; were there a great hue and cry I’d look at restoring them with updated versions, but I’m betting they’re not missed).

Yeah, the world turns, technologies change, and I have this blog that lives on.

So, I’ve been to the Epic User Group Meeting for a love-in on technology we can’t have for years, and then I went to help with a go-live at Wake-Forest Baptist Medical Center for their ED’s Epic go-live. It was refreshingly weird to see a good training program in action and help their academics and residents get into the fight with a new system.

Then, home to work.

Also, I have the admin responsibilities. Some of which I’m decent at, and other I’m charged with that are not under my control, nonetheless which need me to get them done. And yet I cannot move forward. It actually makes me feel a little compassion for the admins who walk among us. A little.

In case you were wondering stale blogs seem to be in big demand, given my email. Daily emails are received, offering me ‘guest posts’, or SEO optimizations, or offers of ads that never work out, or some other goofy idea. Like a blog that’s posting once a month needs any of that.

Yeah, that sounds very generic, so let me tell you about when I decided to convert from the free (14 day) trial and spend the bucks. A patient presents feeling frankly terrible and with a diffuse vasculitic rash. Very early in the history it’s determined the patient has been taking quite a lot more methotrexate than intended (mixup, not sure why) so I tried out my new Pepid: ‘methotrexate’ brings up not just the drug, but throws me a lifeline: ‘overdose’ is on the front-page drop down menu. I clicked on that, and it took me to the antidote (Leucovorin AD, liquid folate, which I didn’t remember), and then, tells me it’s dosed based on body surface area, then offers a calculator, all in serial – sequential clicks. Amazing, and terrific.

That paragraph contains their Achilles heel: The Bucks. It’s never been cheap, and it’s not getting cheaper.

This year I elected to forgo renewing Pepid. It’s not that it’s not good (it is), it’s that the difference between the excellent free medical apps (Epocrates) (Medscape) plus now ubiquitous online resources (UpToDate supplied by my Corporate Overlords) minus their requested yearly rate for my iPhone ($264/year) wasn’t worth it. That’s just for the iPhone app, if you wan their iPad app you’ll have to buy that separately. Really, for only $264 they can’t just throw in the iPad app.

Imagine if you were to accidentally order the 3 year plan: $694. Sticker shock. Wow. So, if you asked them for a downgrade to the one year of the program, they’d do that, right? Sucker…

That’s right. My friend Rick (A terrific Physician Executive, Coach and pioneering blogger) accidentally clicked the 3 year button, immediately asked for a downgrade, and was told no. Pepid was more interested in his money than his loyalty or the customer experience.

In case you don’t recall, this is the nice elderly lady who was working as a bus monitor when she was verbally abused by some feral children who thought it would be a good idea to video the attack and post it to YouTube.

One good guy started this donation page to raise $5K ‘to send her on the vacation of a lifetime’. They raised $703,833. That’ll make for a very nice retirement fund, and she can vacation when she wants.

Good for Max Sidorov for doing this (and for indiegogo for having a platform to make it happen).